Last month, Chinatown’s neighborhood advocates placed a strong vote of confidence in the power of proactive community planning. The Chinatown Working Group — comprising over 40 community-based organizations and three community boards — has been meeting for over a year to hash out the issues that matter most to the people who live, work, and go to school in the neighborhood. The MAS Planning Center provided support to the Working Group process early on by providing area maps and timely information on community-initiated planning.

The group voted to pursue a 197-a plan—one of the City’s most comprehensive planning tools. Named for the section of the City’s Charter that enables them, 197-a plans provide a way to capture a community vision and translate that vision into policies and strategies. (You can view summaries of all of the City’s adopted 197-a plans here.) The Chinatown Working Group has already begun work identifying themes and principles that will guide their work over the coming year. Continue Reading>>

Last Saturday, MAS, the Pratt Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment (GCPE), and the Pratt Institute Planning Student Association sponsored the Livable Neighborhoods Program at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Students of Pratt and other city universities, joined members of the local community for a half-day of training sessions focused on the public’s role in New York’s planning decisions.

Launched in 2007, the Livable Neighborhoods Program (LNP) provides New Yorkers with the tools and resources necessary to effectively plan their neighborhoods. GCPE has recognized the value of the program to train incoming students on planning processes in New York City.

For more information on the LNP, visit MAS.org/lnp.

“A renewal effort has to be conceived as a process of building on the inherent social and economic values of the community. Neglecting these values through programs of massive clearance and redevelopment can disrupt an entire community.”

These words could easily have been written by South Bronx activist Yolanda Garcia. In the early 1990s, she founded an organization known as We Stay/Nos Quedamos, and led a movement of residents who wanted to remain in their neighborhood despite the City’s plan to redevelop it with low-density, mixed-income housing.  They created an alternative plan for affordable housing development at Melrose Commons that is still being implemented today.

However, the words above are actually the opening statement of the Cooper Square Alternate Plan, written in 1961 by a group of activists from the Lower East Side, including Frances Goldin. Known as the Cooper Square Committee, they opposed Robert Moses’ urban renewal plan to demolish and redevelop more than 2,500 housing units in their neighborhood.

On July 13, the Municipal Art Society celebrated the kindred spirits of these two community activists by presenting the annual Yolanda Garcia Community Planner (YGCP) Award to Ms. Goldin. MAS created the YGCP award in 2006 to honor the memory of Ms. Garcia, who passed away in 2005. Selected from an open nomination process by a panel of judges consisting of former honorees and leaders in the community planning field, the awardee must have no formal training in planning, and must have demonstrated his or her ability to overcome the many obstacles to grassroots planning and bring neighborhood need and vision into New York City’s planning process. Continue Reading>>

MyCITI.org now links you directly to the City’s newest mapping resource: NYCityMap. Brought to you by the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunication (DOITT), the new map features a much expanded selection of data, aerial photos, and much more. You can search by address, block and lot, or intersection.

To help learn to navigate this new tool, click here for a step-by-step training guide, or contact Sideya Sherman at the MAS Planning Center or ssherman@mas.org for assistance and upcoming trainings.

On Tuesday, June 9, nearly 300 New Yorkers — community board members and staff, their supporters, elected officials, and MAS — turned out to rally around community boards and to send a strong message to City Council that the public cannot afford for community boards to take a big hit. As reported last week, community board budgets — currently, at just under $200,000, and not having had a single increase in 19 years — are looking at cuts totaling $35,000 each.

A cut of that magnitude results in a savings to the City of only about $2 million, but impacts the operations of the board to the point where their ability to do the work of the people — ensuring a voice in local decision-making, overseeing essential municipal services, and serving as a place-based provider of constituent services — becomes next to impossible.

Please contact your local council member and urge them to restore the community board budgets: stronger community boards equal stronger communities, and the public can’t afford to take this hit!

Your community board provides a range of services vital to your community’s welfare, from overseeing essential municipal services, to ensuring that you have a voice in local decision-making, to serving as a place-based provider of constituent services, but each and every one of our city’s community boards is currently facing a budget cut of $35,000.

In response to this, join all five of New York’s borough presidents, all 59 of New York’s community boards, and community advocates of all stripes next Tuesday, June 9, at 11:00 a.m., on the steps of City Hall, to call on the City Council for the restoration of community board budgets for the coming fiscal year. (This rally has been organized by the Manhattan Borough President’s Office.)

Community boards are the public’s interface with New York City’s enormous and complex government, and they are also government agencies’ conduit to the public. Meaning, for example, that when the Department of Health needs to update a community on the spread of the H1N1 virus, it asks the community board for help with outreach. Continue Reading>>

Pressure is mounting to halt the national tide of foreclosures. New York’s housing advocates are working at the frontlines to keep people in their homes and to ensure that solutions currently being generated at the city and state level respond to New York’s unique housing and neighborhood needs.

A MAS Planning Center panel discussion moderated by Eva Hanhardt of the Pratt Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment late last year, tapped the insights of Audrey Waysee, Center for New York City Neighborhoods; Josh Zinner, Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project; Mark Winston-Griffith, Drum Major Institute; Patricia Kerr, Neighborhood Housing Services, Jamaica;and Ingrid Gould Ellen, Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, to confront the question: how do we stabilize neighborhoods experiencing high rates of foreclosure? Continue Reading>>

As always, the MYCITI website allows you to easily create and view maps about your community’s land use and zoning, property ownership, subway routes, schools, elected officials, and more. For a short while, as we finalize improvements, you can visit us at www.myciti.mas.org.

On Tuesday, November 18, at 6:30 p.m., Urban Center Books and the MAS Planning Center will co-host a book talk by author, planner, academic, and activist Tom Angotti on his latest book, New York for Sale, chronicling the rise of grassroots planning in New York, and drawing heavily on the Atlas of Community-Based Plans.

“Too many books focus merely on the problems of center cities or propose planning solutions only applicable in greenfield sites. Angotti chronicles a significant alternative – the 100 or more community-based plans developed in New York City since the 1960s. This is an important and compelling story of ‘urban policy from the bottom up.” – Ann Fosyth, Department of City and Regional Planning, Cornell University reviewing New York For Sale.

Angotti, who serves as Director of the Hunter College Center for Community Planning and Development, and is a founding member of the Community-Based Planning Task Force, will present his compelling new book on how community-based planning confronts the market forces that drive New York City real estate. Reception to follow.

New York for Sale: Community Planning Confronts Global Real Estate
Tuesday, November 18, 6:30 – 8:00 p.m.
At the The Municipal Art Society, 457 Madison Avenue,at East 51st Street.
Free, but reservations are strongly recommended due to limited capacity. RSVP to 212-935-2075.

New York is a city of neighborhoods—most of them residential neighborhoods. New York is also a city of renters—two-thirds of us secure housing through renting. While news about the foreclosure crisis and its fallout goes global, the housing impacts are irrefutably local and imply different burdens for different cities. For example, foreclosure filings in New York City doubled between 2004 and 2007—more than twice the rate for New York State.

A report by the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy points out that while 40 percent of the 2007 foreclosure filings affected condos and single-family buildings, 60 percent of the filings were levied on 2-4 family buildings. That translates into a loss of housing for more than 76, 000 New Yorkers—at least 38,000 of whom are renters. Continue Reading>>